As the 438 asylum-seekers are transferred from the Norwegian freighter Tampa, which rescued them, to the Australian naval vessel HMAS Manoora, questions arise as to why the government is engaging this expensive and humiliating operation.
Yesterday, Federal Court judge Tony North lifted a temporary injunction that would have prevented a transfer of the asylum seekers from Australian waters. He did so after the Commonwealth government gave an undertaking that it would abide by any court ruling when the case is fully heard during this week. The Victorian Council for Civil Liberties and others are seeking court orders to have the asylum seekers brought to Australia for processing. The Government’s position is that they should not be brought on to Australian soil.
Instead, the government proposes to use its naval vessel to take the asylum seekers on a 10-day day voyage to Port Moresby. From there some will be sent to Nauru and others to New Zealand for determination of their refugee status. Whatever happens, the Government must abide by its undertaking to the court. If the court orders the asylum-seekers back to Christmas Island, they should be turned around. It may well be that many of the asylum-seekers will ultimately end in Australia if that they are found to be refugees. The question arises why does Australia not just bring them on to shore immediately and process them as if they had landed on Australian soil in the first place.
There can really only be one answer. Prime Minister John Howard has seen the issue as a vote winner. He knows that a majority of Australians do not want the asylum seekers to land here. He is playing on exaggerated concerns about being swamped by refugees from our North.
Australia has been a humiliated by New Zealand which has done the decent and humanitarian thing by offering to take up to 150, mainly women and children, of the asylum-seekers. One can only guess at the motive of Nauru in accepting the remainder, but it does not require much imagination to suspect that money must have been a key element. Nauru has a population of just 12,000 people. It is desperately cash-strapped and has a strong dependency on Australia.
It is obvious that cost and efficiency – – criteria it so often favoured by this Government in other matters – – are not the criteria being used here. It is going to cost Australia much more to send these people to Nauru for processing than to process them on Christmas Island. The Government should make public the costings as they occur.
In the meantime, the Government has done huge damage to Australia’s reputation, particularly in Europe which has a far greater refugee problem than Australia per head of population. The Government has created a large amount of ill-will towards Australia in Norway. It has undone a large amount of goodwill produced by a the Olympic Games. Australians can only hope that many people in Europe realise that the people of a nation should not universally be blamed for the decisions of their governments, though in this instance so much of the public expression by ordinary Australians has been in favour of the Government’s stand – – quite wrongly in the view of this newspaper.
The Government’s handling of this issue is to be further condemned because of the large divisions it has a created within the Australian community. Those divisions are manifest on talkback radio and in the letters columns but they are also running within families. This is not an ordinary policy issue where disagreements are relatively benign. It involves basic instincts that deeply conflict: compassion, concerns about security (often well-meaning), humanity, racism, meanness and generosity.